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Thursday, March 10, 2011

Rwanda in Six Scenes by Stephen W. Smith

A number of memories connected with Rwanda play in my mind like
scenes from a movie, although I don’t pretend they add up to a film. In
1994 a genocide was committed against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. All
else about this small East African country, ‘the land of a thousand
hills’, is open to question and, indeed, bears re-examination. ‘Freedom
of opinion is a farce,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in 1966 in ‘Truth and
Politics’, ‘unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts
themselves are not in dispute.’ The problem with Rwanda is not only that
opinions and facts have parted company but that opinion takes
precedence.

The first scene: I’m walking beside Paul Kagame, the current
president of Rwanda and then a rebel leader, past low picket fences and
small prefabricated houses in a residential suburb of Brussels. It’s
cold and our breath mingles in the air as we speak. Kagame is swaddled
in a thick coat. Even so, he remains a spindly figure with a birdlike
face. I can’t warm to him, but I know him well enough by now to hazard
the question that has been preying on my mind for a while: ‘Why is it
always you, the vice-president, whom I meet when I have dealings with
the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and not Alexis Kanyarengwe?’ Kanyarengwe
was the movement’s president. ‘Don’t worry,’ he chuckles. ‘You’re seeing
the boss. Kanyarengwe is only our front man. You’d be wasting your
time.’

This was in 1992. The RPF had been set up in 1987 in Uganda
by Tutsi exiles. Kagame’s parents had fled with him to Uganda when he
was four. At the time of our meeting in Brussels, Kagame was avoiding
the French. A few months earlier, in 1991, he’d just returned to his
hotel near the Eiffel Tower from a meeting with officials at the Elysée
when the French police called him in for interrogation. They were
inquiring into a murky incident that was never entirely elucidated.
Police sources claimed that members of Kagame’s delegation were ‘roaming
around town with bags full of cash to buy weapons’; Kagame claimed the
police were trying to discredit him. Tensions were running high between
the rebel movement and France. The French were providing military
support – 150 soldiers, later increased to 300, plus significant arms
shipments – to the Hutu-dominated Habyarimana regime in Kigali, which
the RPF was fighting to overthrow. Rwanda was a former Belgian colony,
with eight million subsistence farmers jostling for a livelihood in a
territory smaller than Haiti, and with little in the way of mineral
wealth. It was a place where France felt obliged to assert itself as a
tutelary power in Africa, if only to maintain its credibility as a
guarantor of its local ‘friends’ and protégés and to defend ‘la
Francophonie’ in Rwanda against the RPF, which operated from
English-speaking Uganda. As for Kanyarengwe, the RPF figurehead, events
would soon show that Kagame was telling the truth: he, Kagame, was the
main man of the insurgency. Kanyarengwe, the nominal leader, was a Hutu
defector: as head of the Rwandan secret services, he had helped
Habyarimana to power in a coup d’état in 1973, but they later fell out
and in 1980 he fled Rwanda. Ten years later – and two months after the
RPF’s military campaign was launched from Uganda – Kagame offered
Kanyarengwe the helm of the rebel movement to deflect the charge that
the RPF was a Tutsi organisation. Kanyarengwe accepted in order to spite
Habyarimana.

In the 1990s I was the Africa editor of the French daily newspaper Libération.
The combination of the paper’s independence from the notorious
Franco-African networks and my US passport represented Kagame’s best
chance of an unbiased hearing in France, where government officials
routinely referred to his rebel forces as the ‘Khmers noirs’. At the
time, French public opinion made short shrift of small-scale military
interventions in Africa. In June 1992 I alerted readers to what the Libération
headline called ‘The Elysée’s Secret War’ in Rwanda – a deployment
which had not been debated in parliament and had received almost no
attention. In May 1993, 11 months before the extermination of the Tutsis
began, I warned that ‘genocide’ was looming. But I also fell victim to
the RPF’s manipulation of the press: I wrote about the supposed
activities of the so-called Zero Network – presidential death squads –
as well as the akazu, literally the ‘small house’, said to be
the command structure responsible for pre-genocidal killings of Tutsis.
Habyarimana’s in-laws were said to run the akazu and while I
didn’t accuse President Habyarimana himself, I did point an
incriminating finger at his wife, Agathe, and her brothers, accusing
them of organising massacres of the ‘Tutsis of the interior’, as the
oppressed minority inside the country was known. It was their way of
retaliating against the Tutsis of the diaspora who had invaded the
country from Uganda.

There were indeed massacres of Tutsis before
the genocide – but they were organised by other people and at different
levels of the state apparatus. Today, with hindsight, I know that the
Zero Network didn’t exist and I’ve come to refer to the akazu, which continues to be used as a default category in journalistic and academic writing, as au cas où
– French for ‘in case’ – as in ‘in case we find no master plan for the
genocide in Rwanda’. I can’t say whether there was or wasn’t a master
plan for the extermination of the Tutsis, some Rwandan equivalent of the
Wannsee Conference. Historians must lay that question to rest’; the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the special UN court
based in Arusha and charged with trying genocidal planners and killers,
has found no one guilty of ‘conspiracy to commit genocide’ since it
started its proceedings 16 years ago.

The Zero Network was first
mentioned in an open letter published in 1992 by another defector from
the Habyarimana regime, Christophe Mfizi, who had been the head of the
government’s propaganda office in Kigali. As he later explained, he was
anxious to avoid a libel suit. So he used ‘Zero’ as a way of fingering
Agathe Habyarimana’s brother, Protais Zigiranyirazo, the prefect of
Ruhengeri, the presidential family’s home province. Without giving his
full name, Mfizi accused ‘Mister Z’ of running a network of hit squads, a
charge a Rwandan journalist called Janvier Afrika wrote up in elaborate
detail the following year.

Afrika has since recanted his
testimony, explaining in similarly abundant detail how it was suggested
to him by the RPF. Whether or not this is true, it’s perhaps significant
that he recanted only after the RPF had taken power in Kigali, in
November 1994, by which time he had fallen foul of the new regime. He
fled to Cameroon, where I lost his trail in 1998. The ICTR has never
summoned him as a witness. For his part, Mfizi obtained political asylum
in France in September 1996, having resigned as the RPF’s first
ambassador to Paris. Ten years later he submitted an exhaustive report
on the Zero Network – nearly 50,000 words – at the request of the ICTR’s
Office of the Prosecution. He repudiated the term akazu,
which, he wrote, could not take the measure of ‘the political reality,
and even less so the criminal reality … of the period between 1980 and
1994’. However, he reiterated his accusations against Zigiranyirazo,
whom he now named, although his evidence did not bring a conviction: in
November 2009, ‘Mister Z’ was acquitted on appeal by the ICTR.

*

The
second scene etched on my memory is set in a sombre living-room with a
low ceiling 40 kilometres south of Paris. It is 1998; I’m sitting on a
couch opposite Agathe Habyarimana, now the widow of the former Rwandan
president, whose plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, triggering the
genocide. Photographs of the slain general cover the walls. Next to Mrs
Habyarimana, now in her mid-fifties, sit four of her eight children:
Jeanne and Marie-Merci; Léon and Bernard. I’ve been seeing Bernard for
some time and he has persuaded his mother to meet me on her return to
France after two years in Gabon. There are many grandchildren underfoot;
eventually they’re banished from the room.

What do you ask ‘the Lady Macbeth of the Rwandan genocide’, as
Philip Gourevitch called her? How do you approach a conversation with
someone who’s been portrayed as the latter-day incarnation of a
legendary sorceress in Rwandan dynastic history? Or as the ultimate
‘Hutu power’ extremist, who some believed was behind the assassination
of her own husband for accepting a power-sharing agreement – the Arusha
Peace Agreement signed in August 1993 – with the Tutsi rebel movement?
What can you say to someone who’s generally presented by journalists,
human rights activists and academics as the engineer of the 1994
extermination campaign? I ask myself a simpler question: would her
grown-up children huddle around her if there were grounds for suspicion
that she conspired to murder their father?

Agathe Habyarimana
recounts what she saw in Rwanda during the genocide, from the moment she
and her family heard the explosion of the presidential jet, which was
hit by a missile right above their heads at 8.25 p.m., with debris
raining into their garden, until her evacuation by the French army three
days later. ‘We collected the body parts and gathered them on plastic
sheeting or carpets. We were able to identify my husband, Elie’ – she’s
referring to one of her half-brothers – ‘and several other members of
the delegation. But our efforts were hampered as we were under constant
gunfire. I didn’t speak to any civilian or military authority, still
less issue orders.’ In addition to her only brother, ‘Mister Z’, Agathe
Habyarimana had two half-brothers. Elie Sagatwa was one of them; he was
also her husband’s private secretary. If the akazu really was
the nerve centre of the genocidal project kick-started by the
president’s assassination, would Sagatwa and his sister have hatched a
plot that involved Sagatwa’s own death, in order to kill a man they were
both intimate with, and could easily have eliminated in some other,
simpler way?

A few months and several meetings later, I published an interview with Agathe Habyarimana in Libération. The interview was a scoop, but the prospect of providing a platform for a notorious génocidaire
had prompted a ruckus in the newsroom. One of my colleagues had
described my piece as ‘revisionism’. I told the editor-in-chief that I
was always eager to revise what I or others had got wrong and suggested
my colleague should write a profile of Agathe Habyarimana containing all
the incriminating facts he could muster, which could be printed
alongside my interview. After ten days, the face-off ended with a bad
compromise.

There wouldn’t be a profile but my interview had to be kept
short. So in fewer than a hundred words, headlined ‘I’m not afraid of
the truth,’ Mrs Habyarimana said that she was ready to appear before the
ICTR at any time, that the akazu was a portmanteau word, a
term of convenience, and that her son Jean-Pierre had never been a ‘pal’
of Mitterrand’s son, Jean-Christophe, who was his father’s Africa hand
at the Elysée in the 1980s and early 1990s. ‘So much has been invented
without ever giving me a fair chance to reply.’ That was the only
sentence I felt uncomfortable about publishing.

In the same year,
1998, the French judiciary opened an investigation into the downing of
Habyarimana’s plane at the request of relatives of the French crew
members who had died in the crash. This marked the beginning of a long
legal tug-of-war between Paris and Kagame’s RPF regime in Kigali.
Relations between the two reached their nadir in November 2006, when a
French judge issued international arrest warrants for nine key members
of Kagame’s entourage. Rwanda severed diplomatic ties with France. Much
was written about the self-aggrandising investigative magistrate
Jean-Louis Bruguière, and about France’s hostility to the RPF regime.
The Spanish judiciary, widening an investigation into the murder of some
Spanish missionaries, reached even more grievous conclusions. In 2008, a
judge in Madrid, Fernando Andreu Merelles, issued international arrest
warrants for 40 RPF leaders on counts of ‘acts of genocide, crimes
against humanity, war crimes and acts of terrorism’. The Rwandan
leaders, first among them Paul Kagame, were held responsible for ‘the
attack on the life of President Juvénal Habyarimana … with a view to
preparing the final offensive to seize power and to create a situation
of civil war’.

The Kagame regime fought back. In August 2008 it
accused France of having played an active role in the ‘preparation and
execution of the 1994 genocide’, and threatened to issue 33 arrest
warrants targeting French politicians, including three former prime
ministers – Balladur, Juppé and Villepin – and the army top brass. Since
then relations have improved; France and Rwanda restored diplomatic
ties towards the end of 2009. In February 2010, President Sarkozy spent
four hours in the Rwandan capital to seal the reconciliation. He
admitted to France’s ‘errors’ and, more specifically, ‘a form of
blindness when we failed to discern the genocidal dimension’ of the
Habyarimana regime. Speaking about the génocidaires still at
large on French soil, he mentioned the government’s decision to refuse
asylum to ‘one of the persons concerned’ – a transparent reference to
Agathe Habyarimana, whose request had been definitively rejected by the
Conseil d’Etat four months earlier. Only days after Sarkozy’s return to
Paris in March, she was briefly taken into custody as a result of an
international arrest warrant issued against her by Kagame’s government
in October 2009. It was an event staged for the media. She was released
the same day on condition that she report regularly to the police. Nine
months later, in December 2010, a formal request for extradition had
still not been submitted by the Rwandan judiciary.

The rejection of Agathe Habyarimana’s asylum request in France was largely based on akazu-linked
charges brought against her brother before the ICTR. The ruling was
made a month before the ICTR acquitted Protais Zigiranyirazo. As for Mrs
Habyarimana’s surviving half-brother, Séraphin Rwabukumba, both the UN
tribunal and the courts in Belgium, where he lives, have abandoned
proceedings against him. It’s just possible that the akazu was a
women-only conspiracy, or that Agathe Habyarimana acted on her own. But
if so, why hasn’t the ICTR indicted her? And why did the RPF regime
wait 15 years before issuing an international arrest warrant in 2009? It
could be that there are simply no legal grounds for prosecution, or
that Rwanda’s tardy arrest warrant was just a way of intensifying the
pressure on France. It could also be that no one – least of all the RPF
leadership in Kigali – is interested in a trial in which the downing of
Habyarimana’s jet in 1994 would inevitably come under scrutiny.

*

A
third scene, May 1994: I reach Butare, the biggest town in southern
Rwanda, by car from neighbouring Burundi. On the way, I’m stopped at
numerous Hutu roadblocks. The barriers are manned mostly by young people
with clubs, hammers or machetes. At one, a small boy is holding a
nail-studded cudgel with tufts of bloody hair. The smell of putrefying
bodies by the roadside is sickening. The starter of my dilapidated car
is defective and the militiamen lay down their weapons to give me a
push. Being French – or French enough – I’m regarded as a friend. ‘Vive
la France!’ They wave their hands, which I’d just shook, as I make for
the next roadblock.

In Butare, the Catholic bishopric is a safe
haven. The priests allow me in and provide me with a room for the night.
From my window, I can see the imposing red brick cathedral built by the
Belgians just across the street. I walk over there, knock at the
presbytery door, stay for a while and then return to my room. The last
surviving Tutsis in Butare hiding out in these two buildings, the
cathedral and the bishopric. Whichever of the two they’re in, they
believe the one across the street is ‘safer’. A young woman in tears
begs me to hide her in the boot of my car and drive her out of the
country. ‘I really can’t. We wouldn’t even reach the edge of town.’ ‘You
want me to die.’ Throughout the night, I hear noises in the streets –
drunken militiamen – and also above my head, when from time to time the
Tutsis hiding in the double ceiling drag their numb bodies across the
floor in an attempt to stretch or get a breath of fresh air. Twice in
the night, furious fists batter at the wooden entrance door and coarse
voices vow to return in search of ‘cockroaches’. When they finally go
away, the ceiling weeps.

In the morning, over breakfast, I talk to the priests. They’re
prepared to die with their ‘guests’ at the hands of the militia; they
describe the militia as ‘God’s children who’ve lost their way’. I don’t
like to leave without a modest offer of hope. ‘The RPF is advancing
rapidly. Soon they’ll reach Butare, and it’ll all be over. Just hold out
for a few more days!’ I stare into bitter smiles. ‘That’s no solution,’
someone says. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because they’ll kill us.’ ‘But why on earth
would they want to kill you? You’ve stuck together, Hutus and Tutsis!’
‘Precisely for that reason.’ I drive away dispirited and bewildered.
It’ll take me a long time to grasp that, for many of the exiled Tutsis
who are now returning, especially the generation raised or born abroad,
the genocide is not only what happened over the hundred days between
April and July 1994, but an entire history of violence, discrimination
and hardship that began with the so-called Social Revolution of the
Hutus in 1959. In their eyes, Hutus and Tutsis can’t live together on
equal terms because, unless the minority keeps the majority in check,
Tutsis will always be humiliated or killed. To pretend otherwise, as the
‘Tutsis of the interior’ did when they stayed in the country after
1959, is to betray the dead among your kith and kin.

*

A
change of location: Nairobi, February 1996, two years into the new RPF
dispensation in Rwanda. As I speak to Seth Sendashonga, his vivid eyes
are glazed with sadness. I have just spent several weeks in Rwanda, and
have returned bearing notepads full of crimes. It isn’t as if he doesn’t
know what happened: on the contrary, I’d leaned heavily on
Sendashonga’s contacts in Rwanda. In 1991, when he joined the RPF,
Sendashonga was the only eminent Hutu-turned-rebel who was not a
defector from the Habyarimana regime. He undertook to rewrite the
rebels’ political platform, to explain to the children of exile what the
land of their fathers was like and, more important, to build bridges
with opposition parties in Rwanda. ‘Our agenda is not revenge but true
democracy,’ he assured them. Under the new regime, Sendashonga became
Kagame’s minister of the interior. But he could not accept the RPF’s
reprisals for the genocide, including planned massacres and systematic
killings. Kagame failed to respond to any of the 700 letters documenting
abuses which Sendashonga sent him. Eventually, Sendashonga had to face
the fact that he was only another front man. Six months before we met in
Nairobi, he resigned and went into exile.

Poring over a table
strewn with papers, Sendashonga and I compare two independent lists of
people killed in Gitarama province, central Rwanda, during the first 11
months after the RPF took power. We move forward line by line, name by
name, address by address, cross-checking dates. One list has been
compiled by parish priests throughout the prefecture; the other
established at neighbourhood level for 11 of the 17 communes in
Gitarama. The two lists largely tally. The first comprises about 25,000
dead, the second 17,000. Assuming RPF reprisals were equally severe
everywhere in Rwanda this leads to an extrapolated figure of 150,000
people killed between July 1994 and April 1995 in the entire country.
Based on research completed in August 1994 in 41 of the 145 Rwandan
communes, Robert Gersony, a UNHCR consultant, estimated that ‘between
25,000 and 40,000 persons’ were killed during the first 100 days of RPF
rule. The Gersony report – in fact just briefing notes – was leaked to
the press. Under intense pressure from Kigali and its allies, the UNHCR
went on the record denying its existence. No Gersony report, no dead.

In February 1996, Libération
published my investigation into the killings allegedly committed by the
post-genocide regime. I estimated that ‘more than 100,000’ Hutus had
been murdered during the RPF’s first year in power. Libération
also published an interview with Gérard Prunier, a specialist on the
Great Lakes region, and the eyewitness account of a Rwandan nurse who
had described to me two sites where he claimed he had been forced to
work: one near Kigali where, he said, prisoners were put to death (their
skulls were crushed), and another in a game reserve, the Akagera
National Park, where scores of Hutus were cremated. There wasn’t much of
a reaction to the dossier, though the Rwandan embassy in Paris issued a
strongly worded denial. The wire services picked up the story but it
disappeared very quickly. It was just a sour note in a concert.

Seven
months later, in October 1996, the Rwandan army dispersed the Hutu
camps in eastern Zaire, today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo. More
than a million Hutus streamed back into Rwanda, while 300,000 fled
deeper into Zaire. Of that 300,000 nearly two-thirds died over the next
six months, according to a field study by Médecins sans frontières. They
were killed or died of disease, exhaustion and hunger as they made
their way across the African interior. The UNHCR spoke of ‘crimes
against humanity’, but, again, there was hardly any response. Twelve
years later, in August 2010, a fresh investigation by the UN put the
number killed at ‘probably in the several tens of thousands’:

The
extensive use of edged weapons (primarily hammers) and the apparently
systematic nature of the massacres of survivors after the camps had been
taken suggests that the numerous deaths cannot be attributed to the
hazards of war or seen as equating to collateral damage. The majority of
the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick … the
apparent systematic and widespread attacks described in this report
reveal a number of inculpatory elements that, if proven before a
competent court, could be characterised as crimes of genocide.

The new regime in Kigali went after Sendashonga in exile. In 1996, the day before Libération
published the dossier on the RPF killings, he was ambushed and
sustained two bullet wounds. He identified one of the two attackers as
his former ministry bodyguard in Kigali. The other was Francis Mgabo, an
official from the Rwandan embassy in Nairobi, who attempted to dispose
of his firearm in the toilet of a nearby petrol station. The Kenyan
authorities asked Rwanda to lift Mgabo’s diplomatic immunity, so that he
could go on trial, but Kigali refused and for a time the two countries
broke off diplomatic relations. On 16 May 1998 in Nairobi, during the
evening rush hour, gunmen armed with AK-47 assault rifles opened fire on
Sendashonga’s car, killing him and his driver. As his wife later
revealed, he had been scheduled to testify before the ICTR. He had also
set up an armed opposition group (Forces de résistance pour la
démocratie), which attracted both Hutus and Tutsis. His wife claimed
that the acting Rwandan ambassador in Kenya at the time, Alphonse
Mbayire, had organised Sendashonga’s assassination. Mbayire was recalled
by his government, only to be shot dead by unidentified gunmen in a bar
in Kigali a month later.

*

The
fifth scene: Kigali, January 2002. For six years, I’ve been persona non
grata in Rwanda. Finally, I managed to persuade the foreign ministers of
France and Britain, Hubert Védrine and Jack Straw, to take me on their
plane as they make a joint tour of four African countries – the DRC,
Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda – and to drop me off in Kigali. Though it means
they have to give up a seat for a reporter covering their entente cordiale,
they agree. For the Rwandan authorities, it is tricky to deny me a visa
as part of a Franco-British delegation. Védrine is the first French
minister to visit Kigali after the genocide. The UK accounts for half of
Rwanda’s foreign aid. So here I am, an unwelcome visitor, on sufferance
and under surveillance after the ministers’ departure. To meet ordinary
people means putting them at risk while RPF officials, many of whom I
knew when they were still rebels, won’t return my calls. Finally,
Charles Murigande, who is in charge of foreign affairs, comes to my
hotel. I launch into a lengthy profession of good faith. He replies with
a Rwandan proverb: ‘There’s no use drinking milk on a stomach full of
hatred. It’ll throw up blood.’ With this, he draws his chair back and
leaves.

In a town you know, there’s sure to be someone who wants
to see you. Not that Pasteur Bizimungu and I are especially close, but
the former head of state badly needs a friend. Before joining the RPF in
1990, he was the director of Electrogaz, a coveted post in
Habyarimana’s dispensation. He gave up the position to become the
rebels’ spokesman and then a member of their negotiation team in Arusha.
Finally, the RPF picked him as the Hutu figurehead for the
post-genocide government of national unity. He became president while
Kagame effectively ran the country. The pretence came to an end in 2000,
when Kagame took the top job for himself. Bizimungu created his own
political party, Ubuyanja (‘Renewal’). It was a more ambitious idea than
the RPF could allow: he was accused of rekindling ethnic hatred and
placed under house arrest. So I am sure to find him at home.

The soldiers at the gate are taken by surprise: a white man,
tailed by security agents in a car – probably from the Directorate of
Military Intelligence – nervously fingering their cell phones. ‘M.
Bizimungu doesn’t want to see anybody!’ But I’d already rung the bell.
Pasteur Bizimungu shoots out and welcomes me. ‘Yes, I want to see him,
absolutely!’ he tells the soldiers and whisks me inside. He locks the
door and leans against it, breathing heavily. A volley of accusations
about Kagame follow; I remember the expression ‘the dark side of power’.
When it is clear that no one will order me out, Bizimungu leads me into
his library. We talk until we are both exhausted. ‘You know, they were
right,’ he says finally. ‘The explorers, the missionaries, the
colonisers, about the Tutsis being liars. They are liars.’ I am
thrown clean off balance. Bizimungu climbs a stepladder to reach down a
book from a high shelf. In no time, he finds the passage he’s looking
for, about the ‘Tutsi culture of duplicity’, which he reads out,
stressing key words. I make my excuses and leave. Bizimungu has been
driven mad.

After my visit, he was entirely cut off from the
outside world. Two years of solitary confinement at home preceded his
sentence, in 2004, to 15 years in jail. In 2007, the former president
was pardoned by Kagame, who had by then won his first election with 95
per cent of the vote. No one could have mistaken the poll in 2003 for an
exercise in democracy. After the legislative elections of 2008 even the
RPF found the machine score – 98.39 per cent – embarrassing and lowered
it to 78.76 per cent. The EU electoral observers duly documented this
self-restraint, but the head of their mission, Michael Cashman, agreed
with the EU delegate in Kigali, David MacRae, not to go public about it –
it might have raised uncomfortable questions. For his re-election in
August 2010, Kagame approved a slight erosion of his Soviet-style
popularity, allowing his vote to drop to 93 per cent. Rwanda’s
burgeoning Democratic Green Party had lobbied against the country’s
admission to the Commonwealth, citing the regime’s gross human rights
violations. Its vice-president was found decapitated but that didn’t
stop Rwanda joining the postcolonial club, the 18th African Commonwealth
state and – after Mozambique – only the second member that is not a
former British possession. In 2008 Kigali had made English – instead of
French – the official teaching language at all levels of the Rwandan
educational system.
Rwanda, as a recent document has it,

is
a one-party authoritarian state, controlled by President Kagame through
a small clique of Tutsi military officers and civilian cadres of the
RPF from behind the scenes. The majority Hutu community remains excluded
from a meaningful share of political power. State institutions are as
effective as they are repressive. The government relies on severe
repression to maintain its hold on power … Rwanda is less free today
than it was prior to the genocide. There is less room for political
participation than there was in 1994. Civil society is less free and
effective. The media is less free. The Rwanda government is more
repressive than the one that it overthrew.

This is
not the preamble to a new Hutu manifesto but an excerpt from the ‘Rwanda
Briefing’ published last year by four senior figures in the Kagame
regime who’ve now fled abroad: the former secretary general of the RPF
Theogene Rudasingwa; his brother Gerald Gahima, one-time prosecutor
general and vice-president of the Rwandan Supreme Court; the erstwhile
chief of external security services Colonel Patrick Karegeya; and
General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, the ex-chief of staff of the Rwandan
army. Nyamwasa survived an attempt on his life last June, when a
commando opened fire on him in Johannesburg, where he now lives in
exile. The South African authorities laid the blame with the government
in Kigali.

The authors of the ‘Rwanda Briefing’ may not be
trustworthy advocates of freedom and democracy, or paragons of ethnic
inclusiveness, but they describe a system they’re familiar with and a
leader they know well. To his many Western admirers they have this to
say: ‘President Kagame is a very polarising figure. His policies
continue to divide Rwandan society along the lines of ethnicity and to
fuel conflict. The likelihood of a recurrence of violent conflict,
including even the possibility of genocide, is very high.’

*

A
final scene: on 21 September 2006, President Kagame lectures on
‘Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development in Africa: The Rwandan
Experience’ at Princeton. The country he describes – ‘different from the
old system which plunged Rwanda into mayhem’, with ‘checks and
balances’ in place after a ‘decisive break with exclusivist practices’ –
is not one I recognise. Even in a packed auditorium, I have the same
unsettled feeling in Kagame’s presence as I’ve had in the past. He seems
unchanged: taking questions from the audience, he refers to ‘the
genocide in the 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s’, as if ‘the one in 1994’
were merely one in a series – a hair-raising denial of the singularity
of events between April and July 1994. But Goethe was right: ‘Everyone
hears only what he understands.’ The students ask questions about gender
equality in Rwandan politics, the fight against corruption and atrocity
– a genocide? – in Darfur. How many of them have been moved by Hotel Rwanda,
and how many know that Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero played in
the film by Don Cheadle, is now a thorn in Kagame’s side? Rusesabagina
continues to speak out for the ideals that led him to save more than
1200 lives during the genocide in Kigali. For Kagame, however, he is a
‘fabricated hero’ and a collaborator of the die-hard Hutu génocidaires exiled in Congo.

I
am not arguing that we should all know everything there is to know
about Rwanda. My point is that we don’t seem to want to know what
happened in 1994, or what’s happening now. We’ve learned the wrong
lesson from the organised massacre of 800,000 people, which we failed to
prevent. Eager to pay off our moral debt, we’re blinded by guilt. The
near total lack of media coverage of the ICTR trials and findings
suggests that we’re happy to waive our best chance of grasping the inner
workings of the genocide. We clamour for international justice but the
detailed proceedings of the tribunal don’t interest us. At the same
time, the denial of freedom and rights under the previous regime in
Rwanda impels us to shower Kagame with leadership awards and aid money
even as he denies them again. We are hypnotised by the 1994 genocide,
and oblivious to the atrocities of a regime we regard as exemplary. Aid,
we say, must be conditional on good governance – but post-genocide
government is an exception. La Francophonie is at best
ridiculous and at worst a vector of France’s influence, but the
Commonwealth is honourable as it embraces a dictator who favours English
over French. Democracy is a precondition of peace – but not in a
post-genocidal state. Justice, truth and reconciliation heal – but not
the wounds of exterminatory hatred. The invasion and plunder of eastern
Congo are criminal – but not when they’re carried out by genocide
survivors. Hutu power is bad, but Tutsi chauvinism is acceptable. We
hold these opinions not because they’re right but because they put us on
the right side. This makes Rwanda a more tragic place than it needs to
be.